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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

ADVICE: Workplace Bullying in Astronomy II

In
last month’s ADVICE post on Workplace Bullying, I mentioned that there are many ways for a bully to
bully. Here is an incomplete list of bullying tactics adapted from Wikipedia
and modified for the astronomical community. Your bully may employ one of more
of these tactics or he/she may have invented others. Unfortunately, there is no
check list for workplace bullying in astronomy. You cannot study this list,
check 5 or 10 items, and then link to recipe XYZ to solve the problem. Advice
really does need to be tailored to the details of a specific situation.

If you are the victim of workplace bullying, look
over the list and identify the tactics of your bully. Then (Please! Please!
Please!) talk
to someone you trust. You and the people closest to you can begin to develop a
strategy to extricate you from the bully’s influence. Don’t be afraid to pull
in the professionals, a counselor or an ombudsperson, but always check up front
if they can keep your conversations confidential.

Threat
to professional status

belittling
opinions

public
professional humiliation

accusations
regarding lack of effort

intimidating use
of discipline or competence procedures

Threat
to personal standing

undermining
personal integrity

destructive
innuendo and sarcasm

making
inappropriate jokes

persistent
teasing, name calling, insults

intimidation

Isolation

preventing
access to opportunities

physical or
social isolation

withholding
necessary information

keeping the
target out of the loop

ignoring or
excluding

Overwork

undue pressure

impossible
deadlines

unnecessary
disruptions

Destabilization

failure to
acknowledge good work

allocation of
meaningless tasks

removal of
responsibility

repeated
reminders of blunders

setting target
up to fail

shifting goal
posts without telling the target

Here
are some specific examples. The bully:

Falsely
accused you of "errors"

Stared,
glared, or nonverbally intimidated you and was clearly showing hostility

Workplace bullies often act just under the radar, denying their hostile intent or shrugging off their behaviors as humorous or insignificant. Yet, the constant tension they create—and the way their harmful activities tend to build over time—not only damages the individual targets of their behavior but also the workgroup as a whole. That’s why you need to bring bullying out into the open. So you can deal with it directly and put an end to it

"Bringing it out into the open" doesn't work in an organization where management/supervisors close ranks whenever somebody tries to complain and whichever party in some dispute is higher ranking is the one who's always found to be "right". There are a lot of organizations where this happens. If you're a supervisor who's buddies with your own supervisor, then you can get away with a lot.